Exposing Murder Rings and the Realities of McCarthyism: A Deep Dive into FOIA

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1. Taking Another LookOne morning last October, a middle-aged man named Francisco Letelier stepped to a microphone in Washington, D.C.’s Sheridan Circle, surrounded by light Sunday traffic, and spoke to a gathering of maybe a hundred people. Introducing him, the head of the watchdog Institute for Policy Studies said Letelier represented “the power of persistence.” Letelier is an artist and the son of murdered Chilean activist Orlando Letelier. The gathering to commemorate his father had become an annual event; this was the 41st year since the murders of Orlando Letelier and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt.

Orlando Letelier was killed at this traffic loop by a car bomb planted by Augusto Pinochet’s henchmen. The car exploded in front of the Irish Embassy. There under the hard gazes of assorted international statues around the circle (Ataturk, Sheridan on his horse, Korean and Greek diplomats) stood a small, foot-high monument to Letelier and Moffitt. The stone said, “Justice, Peace, Dignity.”

Francisco, his voice breaking, recalled the abuses of power that led to his father’s murder. By gathering that morning, the group was calling attention to the importance of “showing up, speaking up, resisting, and engaging in dialogue.”

I was there that morning because Scott Armstrong, a former Washington Post reporter, told me about the Letelier murder. It was a case, he said, where a Freedom of Information request had made a difference and sent ripples far beyond the United States.

They didn’t have much hope of making a difference when they started. But Letelier’s widow asked Armstrong to help. Working with a pro bono lawyer, Armstrong agreed to investigate what U.S. officials knew about Letelier’s murder. He submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the State Department, the Justice Department, and the FBI. Then they waited. In time, their requests unearthed evidence of a conspiracy behind murders throughout the western hemisphere yet beyond the reach of justice.

After Letelier’s son concluded his speech that October morning, everyone present was invited to take a flower across the circle to the small memorial stone. We placed them—yellow, red, striped, violet blossoms—to honor Orlando and Ronni.

Back in my car, I flipped the ignition. As the engine fired, my heart skipped a beat as I realized that would have been the last sound they heard.

2. My FOIA JourneyFOIA (pronounced foya) is an odd acronym that can seem obscure and inconsequential. A small proportion of Americans submits Freedom of Information requests. As a freelance writer, I’ve submitted relatively few FOIA requests to different government agencies. For one project, I requested public records identifying the five biggest exporters in a secretive industry trading an endangered medicinal plant. It wasn’t exactly the Watergate break-in, but the request yielded information that pointed to high-value players who preferred a low profile.

Then for a book project, I began chronicling what happened when a 1940 factory fire in Baltimore triggered a series of events that caught three families up in the war in dangerous ways. The fire consumed a half-million dollars worth of cork. (Quick backstory: Back in our age of plastics, bottle caps and many other products used slivers of cork, which was a crucial sealant in gaskets of all kinds, including the defense industry’s bomber planes and artillery. Cork came from the cork oak forests of Spain and Portugal—so the U.S. industry relied heavily on those imports. The factory fire stirred rumors of Nazi sabotage, and suddenly the cork industry and its workers were in a national security searchlight.) FBI agents combed the scene for days afterward. But besides a few catastrophic photos in Baltimore newspapers, there was little reporting about the investigation. Nothing about it as sabotage in the public record. So I sent a FOIA request to the FBI, and a few more to the CIA and the State Department. My searches took longer than I expected, and the results came piecemeal. Three years later, I know more about the magic and limits of a FOIA request.

Most FOIA requests come from regular citizens requesting information that isn’t necessarily stamped secret, but the government hasn’t made public. In 2016 the Department of Justice received over 73,000 FOIA requests. Some people think FOIA is in the Constitution, buried in the First Amendment. But the Freedom of Information Act is much younger than that, born during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Johnson signed the law grudgingly, recalled Bill Moyers, his press secretary: “LBJ had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of the Freedom of Information Act…” If information is power, giving it away is giving away power, and LBJ never willingly signed any away.

Today journalists regard FOIA as a slow-drip source that rarely pays off in time for their deadlines. Government agencies often manage to avoid the law’s requirement to make information free, deploying nine exemption rationales built into the law. But for people with time to wait for responses, FOIA can be powerful.

3. A NeedleIn the National Archives, I pored over cables, memos, blue-ink index cards, web-thin carbons and mimeograph copies, declassified time sheets and information trees for wartime intelligence agency the Office of Strategic Services. Eventually I stumbled across a declassified OSS memo of an interview between an OSS recruiter and Herman Ginsburg, a manager for Crown Cork and Seal. A second memo identified another Crown Cork worker as a possible OSS undercover informant. But then I hit a wall. I needed to submit more FOIA requests.

The protocol of a FOIA request varies depending on which agency you’re asking for information. The Department of State, the FBI, and the CIA each had their own different ways to process requests—some by email, some via web-based form. I submitted FOIA requests to those three agencies for information about Ginsburg and another spy recruit who had also come to the U.S. in their youth. The response time to FOIA requests varied widely. I kept a folder of my requests.

4. A CanaryScott Armstrong’s first FOIA experience came even before he became a Washington Post reporter 40 years ago. Armstrong was working for the Senate Watergate investigation committee. As an investigator, he saw congressional staff having to submit FOIA requests to the Nixon administration to get information they should have had access to, since it wasn’t classified—but the administration had stonewalled. Armstrong learned that agencies used all kinds of maneuvers to withhold information. Through the 1980s for the Post, he found FOIA good for casting light on obscure government behavior, often indirectly. Memos often opened a window to the decision process. Armstrong said the cc line often showed who was involved in national security decisions, for example. That’s how you might learn about circles of decision makers, information that could be even more valuable than the memo’s content.

At first, Armstrong’s FOIA requests only turned up benign-looking cables. But eventually they led to the discovery of a network of Latin-American secret police agencies in a half-dozen countries. The network, dubbed Operation Condor, emerged from a secret meeting in 1975 of intelligence chiefs from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay (and later Brazil). Operation Condor allowed member countries to send death squads across borders to kidnap or murder political exiles. Condor was a shadowy ring for extrajudicial murder. Pinochet used the ring to silence his critics even beyond Chile.

5. Packing Tape and GlomarThe CIA is notoriously resistant to information requests. But the CIA was the place to go for the legacy of wartime intelligence. They replied to my FOIA request with an old-school hard copy and extreme discretion. First they sent a crisp letter that politely denied my request. Several journalist friends suggested I appeal. So I did. I gave a twofold rationale for my request: that 1) any national security issue in a 1941 file was almost certainly moot, and 2) my intention was to foster a broader awareness of national issues and history among the public. I even mustered a congressman’s support for my appeal.

Almost a year after my first request I received another letter in the mail with the CIA’s reply. This time the letter-sized envelope was sealed with a bold, three-inch-wide strip of brown packing tape. Were they sending a message? The letter inside stiffly declined my appeal, stating memorably that they could “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request.”

Puzzled by the redundancy of “existence or nonexistence” and amused by the packing tape, I contacted a FOIA expert. Corinna Zarek explained that the CIA’s reply had a name:

it’s called a Glomar response and it has a long history and is fairly commonly used by intelligence agencies when admitting the existence of information (even if the information is non-public and can’t be released under FOIA) could compromise security interests of the U.S.

Zarek explained that although the CIA letter said my only recourse for appeal was a lawsuit, I did have one other option: a FOIA ombudsman at the National Archives. However, it probably wasn’t worth trying. Rarely would officials set aside a Glomar. Judges usually deferred to the agency. I’d probably have to accept the defeat this time, Zarek said.

Nearly half of all FOIA requests are denied. And the trend is going in the wrong direction. “FOIA is not as effective a tool as it should be,” Armstrong told me, “it’s a canary in the mine.”

6. The FBI RespondsThe FBI replied to my request, saying that the file I requested on Herman Ginsburg was available for me at the National Archives, like an interlibrary loan. That, however, was just the start of the retrieval process. When I gave the reference number to a person at the Archives, he said yes, that file might be available—but I’d have to ask the FBI which specific files were there at the Archives. For that I had to submit another FOIA to the National Archives. This second request had to be made by hard-copy letter. So I sent a letter to the National Archives FOIA office, requesting the file and reaching into another thicket for public information. Five days later came an email reply:

Thank you for submitting your Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Act request to the National Archives and Records Administration. Due to the nature of your request, we have forwarded your request to our Office of Research Services, Special Access and FOIA staff, for appropriate handling. …Federal records are transferred to NARA no earlier than 15 years and as late as 30 years from the date the document was created. You will be assigned a new tracking number by that office within the next 20 business days.

They gave me another email address at the Archives for follow-up.

7. The CD Down the HallThese exchanges with the Archives’ staff continued through that spring as they reviewed the material I requested, sifting what information could be shared and redacting in heavy marker what couldn’t. Finally, a FOIA official at the Archives wrote that she had completed a line-by-line review of FBI case files and redacted material “exempted from disclosure in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. 552)… The redactions were applied to protect the identities of confidential sources…” Two files, totaling 84 pages, would be available to me at that location. I could “view a sanitized version of 100-HQ-417406, and a copy of 100-WFO-31318 free of charge in our Motion Picture research room in College Park, Maryland,” the message said. At the reading room they would “provide a CD, for use in the Motion Picture research room, containing a copy of the file in PDF format. You may use this CD to download the file to your personal laptop or thumb drive at no cost to you.”

I was lucky: The College Park facility was only 25 minutes from where I lived. What about requesters writing from the West Coast? I tamped down my hopes and made an appointment for July 6, 2016. That morning I drove around the capital beltway to the Archives facility and found my way to the empty stretch of Adelphi Road. I passed through the security process at the entrance, had my pages of scratch paper stamped (to show that I didn’t steal any from the Archives’ collection) and passed through another security stop to get to the fourth floor.

On the surface, the setting looked like a university library. When I presented my email with the FOIA response, the clerk pointed back into the research room past bookcases containing video and film cases. It was like a librarian had pointed me to the reference desk. Except I was being directed back to a security desk to sign for a limited-use CD. I could sit with my laptop and copy the CD’s files onto my computer. But I could not take the CD itself, which had been burned specifically at my request.

Another story Scott Armstrong told me rattled around my head. He learned the CIA kept a database of all the declassified material that it had already released, so he submitted a FOIA request for that database—all of it. “They hemmed and hawed,” he said. “Finally they said they would provide a printout. It was on old computer paper, the kind with holes punched at the edge? It was two stacks of computer paper, each standing six feet high.”

“No,” Armstrong told the CIA, “I want it as a computer file.” Again they delayed. Finally the requested file would be available to him at a reading room in the National Archives—maybe this room where I now sat. Armstrong could read the file on a computer in the reading room, and he could print it out there. But he couldn’t copy the file or take it away. “A ludicrous sham!” he cried.

Still Armstrong goes back to the well, asking for more.

In the Archives reading room, I held the CD with the FBI file on Herman Ginsburg. Following instructions, I took it to a table nearby, opened my laptop and popped in the disk.

The restrictions on the movement of that physical CD struck me as absurd. What was the sign-out procedure protecting? What security was this declassified information securing?

There were exactly two PDF files on the disk. Before opening either, I immediately copied both files onto my computer. Then I started scrolling through the first file. As I scrolled through, my sense of the light in the room shifted and my eyes became hypersensitive to the sunlight from the bank of windows. My pulse quickened. I felt like I was getting something for my democracy.

8. Palimpsest from a Dark EraWhen at the end of a long search, the thing that was secret arrives just for you, it feels magical. Novelist John Edgar Wideman captures that feeling in Writing to Save a Life, his book about his investigation into the history of Emmett Till and his father, Louis Till. For Wideman, the journey started with a call to the National Archives to request Louis Till’s military records. Wideman soldiers through a series of voicemail messages and wrong turns. Then the magic: After weeks of calls and putting his request in writing, he receives a package in the mail containing the file of Louis Till’s military trial.

Then, inexplicably, for days after the packet arrives he does not read it. Whether from delayed gratification or from fear of its contents, it’s hard for him to say. But I think I understand. There’s something about how the expectations grow in the months after sending a FOIA request. When the result arrives, you want time to take a breath, rein in hopes (“Surely this piece that was secret will answer my quest”) and brace yourself for disappointment.

When Wideman finally reads the file, it stirs waves of emotion and more questions for him. First, how could this information have been withheld from the public? And then: Did the FOIA staff, in their presentation and sequencing of the photocopies, try to influence how Wideman interpreted the file? Was the transcript of Till’s trial assembled 60 years ago or pulled together “just yesterday in response to my Freedom of Information request”? Had anyone read the government file that he was reading now? Wideman imagines contacting the Archives official who sent him the file, “whose name I tell myself each time I see it I should write down in my notebook for safekeeping. To thank. To pester for more. To hold responsible.”

Like Wideman, I paged through the PDF that I received on my laptop screen in the National Archives, hyper-conscious of the packaging of this information: the inscrutable numeric file names, the cover page’s hodgepodge of fonts, from the calligraphic “U.S. Department of Justice” to the sans serif “Federal Bureau of Investigation” and “Screened by: LM Date: 06-29-2016 FOIA,” the date of the Archives’ reply to my request. The big bold letters: “Use Care in Handling This File.” I tried to decipher the “Confidential” stamp, crossed out, and the photocopied form describing the FBI report from March 1955, Washington, D.C.

Reading the files suggested a dragnet from the nadir of McCarthy-ite anti-Communist hysteria. In 1955, when the loyalty-security mania was at its fiercest, the CEO of an international enterprise became a suspected Communist. This was not what I expected. The files showed the chilling effect of investigations behind the televised McCarthy hearings, that reached into people’s memories and hearsay. Pages of interrogations into Ginsburg’s past—interviews with associates, relatives, classmates, and acquaintances from his youth. Interviews with his ex-wife and his siblings. The grainy black and white of scanned documents, accusations of being a Communist, a traitor. Based on one informant’s testimony, Ginsburg’s life was turned upside down. The FBI sent investigators to find former Communist organizers in rural New Hampshire and grill them. Agents in Baltimore interviewed city police officers about Ginsburg’s arrest record. One February day an FBI agent went hunting in the public library to find the 1928 city directory, to determine Ginsburg’s 1928 address and occupation back then. FBI agents visited the University of Maryland Law School and asked the librarian for the 1927 yearbook to find a photograph of Ginsburg and record his “enviable scholastic record.”

In short, where I expected to find information recognizing Ginsburg’s contribution to the wartime intelligence effort in the 1940s, these files showed me the government’s efforts to destroy him. After Ginsburg had lent his energy and intelligence to defeat fascism, federal agents came and ran down every lead on his youth. They poisoned his past.

The experience of being harassed by the FBI left Ginsburg wounded and paranoid for years. No wonder that a colleague who met him later found him deeply suspicious. Against the taint of federal investigation and humiliation, Ginsburg managed to salvage his life and his second marriage.

9. Sunlight Among the SecretsDuring one of my visits to the Archives as I hunted through OSS records, waiting for files to roll out on a handcart, I looked up and saw, in large letters on the screen above the checkout desk, “Happy 50th Anniversary to the Freedom of Information Act! ‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant.’ —U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.”

Then it flashed away and disappeared.

I stood there, surprisingly moved. The Archives was quietly marking LBJ’s little-sung, unloved law. Several dozen Archives visitors like myself glimpsed the salute as they were exercising the right it celebrated.

10. The Car Bomb at Sheridan CircleOfficial confirmation can be a small thing, but it has impact. Documented existence of the secret network of police squads known as Operation Condor emerged in the late 1970s from Scott Armstrong’s FOIA requests. Forty years later, those results continue to ripple. U.S. intelligence files declassified in 2015 proved that Pinochet issued the order to kill Orlando Letelier. State Department records also showed that a month before Letelier’s murder, Henry Kissinger attempted to orchestrate conversations by U.S. ambassadors in the six countries involved in Condor to express “deep concern” at possible political assassinations. The U.S. government knew about Condor at least weeks before the car bomb killed Letelier and Moffitt.

In May 2016, judges in Buenos Aires ruled in the first court case brought against Condor conspirators for murders committed in Argentina. Eighteen former Argentinian military officers, including the country’s former dictator, were convicted and sentenced for kidnapping, torturing and “disappearing” more than 100 activists, including citizens of four other countries. The case was a milestone in moving Condor’s existence into the public record as a killing, multinational conspiracy. The real international conspiracy was even more sweeping than the one conjured by Hollywood in the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor. And its unraveling came, in good measure, due to the cumbersome and imperfect process of FOIA, in the hands of someone who cared enough to persist like Scott Armstrong.

A key piece of evidence in that trial was a declassified 1976 cable from an FBI agent that described Condor in detail.

At the courthouse where the ruling was announced, a Chilean woman choked up as she described how Operation Condor had affected her family. Her brother had fled to Argentina, was kidnapped in Buenos Aires, and vanished. “This trial is very meaningful because it’s the first time that a court is ruling against this sinister Condor plan.”

And every fall, the group remembering Letelier and Moffitt gathers at Sheridan Circle—family members, activists, and government officials—to invoke the message of Justice, Peace, Dignity.

FOIA, in that sense, is more of a relationship than it is a bureaucratic transaction. Armstrong says, “We’ve created a situation now where you have to have a long-range view.” He downloads the State Department phonebook every time he finds it available online. He might not know why he needs it until much later, by which point it may no longer be accessible. Who could predict the value of State Department cables for a murder trial four decades later?

In June 2016, President Barack Obama signed a law updating the Freedom of Information Act, making more government memos accessible after 25 years. No friend to FOIA for most of his presidency, Obama had set a presidential record for censoring or denying access to FOIA-requested information. The number of unanswered requests governmentwide climbed past 200,000. Under Trump, FOIA is an even more brittle tool for holding an unpredictable executive branch accountable. As most FOIA experts predicted at the start of his term, access to federal records continues to decline. At 50 years old, FOIA as a tool for accountability could be just getting started, with more longtime users like Armstrong. Or it could be winding down.

David A. Taylor
is the author of six books including the nonfiction Soul of a People, about the WPA writers of the 1930s, and a prize-winning short fiction collection, Success: Stories. His forthcoming book, Cork Wars, is a true story of three immigrant families caught up in World War II. His writing appears in the Washington Post, Oxford American, Science, and Smithsonian, and in documentary films. Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story, which he co-wrote, was nominated for a Writers Guild Award. He teaches writing with Johns Hopkins University.

1.
One problem with modern American romance is that very little can prevent two Americans who love each other from getting married. (So long as they don’t share a combination of sex chromosomes, and it’s fair to say the tide is turning on that one.) This freedom — relatively unheard of in human history — is perhaps why we have more romantic comedies these days than romantic epics. It’s a limitation dictated by the times. Any story where two heterosexual Americans face any serious obstacle on the path to marriage is going to strain credulity or just plain bug people. While I’ve seen neither Valentine’s Day nor New Year’s Eve — and at the risk of being factually incorrect — I simply can’t imagine those kinds of movies trade in a currency of love problems whose snags aren’t pretty easily untangled. Such stories, as a classical matter, deal, rather, in misunderstandings, missed signals, crossed signals, and bunglings of translation from one heart to another. They’re nice and all, but does anyone out there get hit where it really hurts when they see or read a romantic comedy?

There’s something better, obviously, a more heightened version of the old Boy Meets Girl, Loses Girl formula. I’m talking about the previously mentioned romantic epic, and I’m talking about this because I’ve had a running conversation with my dear wife over the last few years about just what makes a romantic epic epic. This conversation hit a high point recently, as we’re finishing Gone with the Wind, a book I’ve been reading to her since last June.

She’s not alone, obviously. Gone with the Wind inspires mad devotion, in part, I think, because it works as both a romantic epic, and a tale of female empowerment. One reason for the story’s universal appeal, in fact, might lie in how neatly it nails a tricky middle ground between the Left and Right on issues of feminism. Scarlett is a thousand percent devoted to women’s rights — except really in any plural or political sense: Scarlett wants freedom for herself; she’s only truly interested in economic freedom; and could frankly give a damn about the rights of other women, or political liberty, voting, etc. She understands — with a clearsightedness that would be cynical if it weren’t so simply observant — that having money means you don’t really need to vote. For instance, late in the novel, she and Rhett entertain Georgia’s Scallywag Republican Governor at their tacky new McMansion, and even though Scarlett bears a real grudge against the Gov and all his Yankee ilk, she butters them up nonetheless, the better to use them for her own purposes.

In this sense, Scarlett is both a proto-feminist hero, and an almost Ayn Rand-y paragon of self-advancement. Not only does she tickle the imaginations of liberals and libertarians, but her canny progress from marriage to marriage takes place entirely within the boundaries of so-called “traditional” womanhood — something I’d bet more than a few Schlafly-types have found validating.

Even Scarlett’s devoted anti-intellectualism works to her advantage. You will not find a character in American fiction more rigorous in her disdain for abstract or philosophical topics (except as they give pasty old Ashley Wilkes something to be amazing at). Scarlett is interested in nice things, food, money, property, and getting what she wants — nothing else. The key feature of her character is therefore a sort of materialistic pragmatism — and since every branch of American politics considers itself “the practical one,” Scarlett occupies prime real estate to be adored by all sides.

All that being said, and just as ludicrously fantastic a character as Scarlett O’Hara is (the highest compliment you can pay a fictional character is Odyssean, and boy oh boy, is Scarlett Odyssean), none of this would register if Scarlett weren’t given an appropriately larger than life backdrop against which her labors could unfold. The Civil War? Check. Gone with the Wind also wouldn’t work, though, unless there were real problems for the story’s centerpiece romance. Something has to impair the parties’ full consummation in order for the love story to qualify as epic. The more grand the obstacle, the more epic the romance.

A quick survey of romantic epics bears this out. War, of course, is about the grandest and most epic obstacle a love affair could ever trip over. (See The English Patient). Class distinctions also place high on the list. (Likewise Atonement). Tragic events (cue flute from “My Heart Will Go On”) are obviously another. In my opinion, the most epic American romance of the past ten years was a little flick called Brokeback Mountain (based on the short story from Annie Proulx’s “Close Range,” whose lingering after-effects are a version of the same gut-gnawing pity induced by the movie). Brokeback Mountain is a romantic epic for the same reason only same-sex couples are really good candidates to have epically problematic love stories, at least in modern America: the problem for that story’s couple is pretty damn intractable, given their time. In fact, Brokeback Mountain has a harder edge than other classic romances, because the characters aren’t simply kept apart by grand circumstance, but by a threat of doom. Some band of redneck vigilantes would definitely have murdered Jack and Ennis if they’d ever tried to live together happily. The fact that death was a strong possible outcome — because of their love, and not incidental to it — puts that story on a high plane, stakes-wise.

Of course, Scarlett and Rhett face nothing like that. In fact, the inductions drawn from this drive-by survey point to a troubling conclusion for Gone with the Wind’s “epic” status. Scarlett and Rhett aren’t really kept apart by the Civil War. Rhett’s such a dastard that he sits most of the conflict out, right there in Atlanta, with Scarlett and the other ladies, speculating in foodstuffs and running off to England every now and then. Scarlett is in mourning, of course (her first husband died almost immediately after the War broke out), so preemptive norms of seemliness might interrupt the pair’s march to happiness — but Scarlett didn’t even like Rhett at that point, and all Rhett was interested in (I don’t think this scandalous wrinkle is mentioned in the movie) is having Scarlett be his mistress, his (goddammit, but it fits) “no strings attached,” “friend with benefits.”

Rhett does eventually run off to fight, in the last days of the Confederacy, and by the time he and Scarlett cross paths again, Scarlett’s desperate for cash to save Tara, and throws herself into Rhett’s arms, an offering of virtue given in sacrifice for the survival of Tara. Rhett sees right through this (with help from Scarlett’s grubby little turnip paws, of course), and flat, dropkick rejects her, sending her right into the arms of old Frank Kennedy. Once Frank dies, Rhett swoops in and proposes marriage, knowing he can’t wait forever to catch Scarlett between husbands. They marry, seem fond of each other, until Rhett figures out Scarlett is never going to get over that God damned Ashley Wilkes, and it’s “Adios amiga.” Microphone drop. I don’t give no damn.

But take a closer look: What does this story lack that other romantic epics have? Are Rhett and Scarlett kept apart by war? Class distinction? Tragedy? Disease? Threat of destruction?

Nope. They get together because they can, and they break up because one gets pissed at the other. A less grand set of circumstances could not be found.

This is not epic — this is mundane.

2.
At this point I’m in deep trouble. If the takeaway from this essay is that Gone with the Wind lacks the status of an epic romance — that it is, in fact, nothing but a love story with two rather bratty protagonists — my wife is not going to be happy with me.

Fortunately, the genuine size of Gone with the Wind, the sheer land area it occupies in the American imagination, offers enough glitz and orchestra to rocket even the flimsiest of romances up to orbital heights. Whether we’re talking about the novel or the movie, this story is celebrated. The film is such a gigantic deal that it’s easy to forget how enormous a deal the novel was: It won the Pulitzer Prize, captivated the nation, is apparently (if you believe Pat Conroy’s introduction to my copy) given a Biblical place of honor on many a Southern coffee table, and had its movie rights sold off for the unheard of at the time sum of $50,000. At any serious gathering of top shelf American cinema, Gone with the Wind would be at the Kane, Casablanca, Godfather table. Even as non-pop-culture-obsessed a writer as Flannery O’Connor has a story (one of her weirder ones (and that’s saying something)) that involves the famous Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind: “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” which in classic Flannerian style makes us feel both sorry for and annoyed by a cranky genteel Southern White who thinks too highly of himself, in this case because they gussied him up for the movie premiere in a Confederate military costume, which now that he’s way older thinks is actually his original battle uniform and so insists on wearing to special occasions.

Think about that. Gone with the Wind is such a huge deal, Flannery O’Connor wrote a story that hinged on its status in the texture of Southern life. Flannery O’Connor. It doesn’t get any bigger than that.

Which is all to say, something is epic about this story. Can it be an epic because it makes us feel epic? A horror story scares us, a comedy makes us laugh, a tragedy makes us cry — I suppose a romance makes us feel, uh, twitterpated — is that, then, the real mark of genre? Not some academic’s induction based on a leisurely survey of the available material, but the specific kind of blast the story delivers, the special effects it drives into the hearts and guts of readers?

If that’s the case, then I think I’m sitting pretty with my wife. Because Gone with the Wind has got the chops in spite of the fact that the love problem at its center is not only mundane, but teenagerly so. Rhett really does love Scarlett, but has to act like he doesn’t, to protect his feelings, because he knows Scarlett never got over Ashley being the one man she couldn’t have. Drop that love triangle right into a CW plotline and nobody’s going to raise an eyebrow.

In other words, Gone with the Wind surpasses the un-epicness of its romance, and makes us feel romantically epic all the same. This is a serious accomplishment. I wish I could explain how it’s done. Of course, part of it is the historical backdrop, but I think a more important factor is just the expansiveness of the couple, particularly Scarlett (though Rhett’s a pretty insanely intriguing character, too — I’ve heard rumors he was based on Sam Houston — go read about that crazy bastard some time).

But maybe it’s epic because it’s just so successful as a story. I think we need to feel that a story is about everything in order to let it in, let it move us. That’s the mark, I think, of the true masterpiece, and if anything could coherently separate “literature” from “fiction,” that’d be it. It’s a pretty simple standard, actually — all any story has to do is just show us the meaning of life.

Gone with the Wind qualifies. Something in Scarlett’s practicality, something in her determination, something in her hunger (I don’t mean the turnip-eschewing kind, I mean the way Scarlett from the very first scene is driven by this crazy, all-consuming, no-boundaries-recognizing hunger for everything, the way she just wants it all) — there’s something brutal and fine to that. In her strange optimism, too, the way she pushes everything unpleasant from her thoughts, so that faced with the collapse of her third marriage, she is almost transported, idiotic, almost insensate, in her belief that she can fix it all, have it all, that she can get Rhett back — which of course wouldn’t mean that she’d have to give up on Ashley, too — and, most impressively, in her faith that tomorrow holds all the space you’ll ever need to get what you want, and keep it.

This is one of the strange centers of the world, a vein of pure human talent, unearthed and irrefutable, mysterious, friendly, beckoning, and fully beyond us.

The idea came out of nowhere, just appeared in my mind and stayed, occupying my thoughts with visions of the enshadowed, marching dead. Every single man. The events of his life. The circumstances of his death. Page after page after page. A library for a lost generation.

The stories would be humble, detailed, and clear. “Clarence Rowantree was born in Boston in the winter of 1949. He was educated in Catholic schools, and he played halfback for his high school football team. He had a girlfriend, Cathleen Trencher. He got her pregnant their junior year. Plans were made for the couple to wed, but Cathleen miscarried, and was afterwards sent to live with a spinster aunt. Clarence never saw her again. He was drafted the summer after he finished high school, when he was working in his grandfather’s barbershop, sweeping hair into piles, washing combs, and refilling the bottles of tonic. He trained at Fort Sill and was stationed at Mutter’s Ridge, near the Laotian border. His friends in the service called him Rowboat. He was very popular. He could stand upright on his hands for an impressive amount of time, and would perform this trick whenever the guys needed a boost in morale. He was also the company’s unofficial barber, performing trims and shape-ups for when the brass came around on inspection tours. He died after stepping on a landmine while out on routine patrol in his eighth month of service. He was 20.”

The idea moved me greatly, and even though I knew the project would take a long time, I felt rallied by it, and full of energy, so I sat down and did some calculations, to see exactly what kind of commitment I was getting into. I thought that each man’s story needed a full day’s work, and probably more — but I used eight hours as a base figure for estimation purposes. I multiplied eight by 58,175 (the number of names on the Vietnam War Memorial). The answer came out at 465,400 hours. I divided that by twenty-four to get the number of days, and that number by 365 to get the number of years.

I hit the equals sign on my calculator.

The screen read fifty-three.

My mouth dropped open.

Fifty-three.

Years.

I leaned back from my desk and put a hand to my forehead, considering the implications. If I worked nonstop on this project — meaning nonstop, without stopping, at all, for anything, even sleep — I’d be finished in 53 years.

Take that into your heart and tremble at the meaning. If you spent just eight hours composing the life story of every American man killed in the Vietnam war, the job would take you over half a century to complete.

2.
I ran these results by a friend of mine, and even though I was still goggled, he was far less impressed.

“It’s a nice image,” he allowed, “but it’s just a numbers game. You could do that with anything.”

“Anything?” I asked.

“You know,” he said. “Anything where lots of people died.”

He was right, of course, and as soon as I started considering various death tolls (625,000 killed in the Civil War, six million in the Holocaust, fifty million in all of World War II together), it occurred to me just how truly impossible a complete account of those killed in war can be, depending on the war, depending on the number of the dead. In this way, war is categorically different from other kinds of tragedies. When one person dies a tragic death, we seek consolation in the story of who that person was. The details of his life — his flaws and heroics, the people he loved and cared for, the work he did — all that meaningful information has the power to outweigh the fearful or horrifying circumstances of his death.

But when a thousand people die, or a hundred thousand, or a million, or fifty million, the magnitude of loss tilts the scales away from understanding, and toward despair, nihilism, and madness; because we can’t find solace or redemption in a million life stories: it’s absurd even to try.

What we can do, though, is to seek analogs, avatars — ways of distilling the raw, titanic information churned up by war into something relatable and human.

I’ll put it another way: If there were no such thing as fiction, we’d have had to invent it, if we ever wanted to make sense out of a thing like the Vietnam War.

Dispatches, a “New Journalism” account of the war, was the first to be released. It came out in 1977, just two years after the fall of Saigon. It’s an odd, free-wheeling set of stories, at times reminiscent of both Hunter S. Thompson and William Faulkner, with the same pawky humor, fractured lensing, dreamlike narrative, and deliberately subjective attitude toward the underlying reportage. The haziness of the book’s structure grows organically from the material itself, as does the spookiness of it all, the eerie setting and unpredictable action. Herr pays a lot of attention to the superstitions of the grunts, because through them, the men seem to face and even endure their own unrelenting mortal fear, like the man who carries around a sock containing a months-old, uneaten oatmeal cookie mailed to him by his wife. Then there’s the fanatical Lurp, who makes this one chilling war story into a kind of Zen koan: “Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.” Herr speaks to another young man, a marine from Miles City, Montana, who checks Stars and Stripes every day, hoping to learn that someone from his hometown has been killed. “I mean, can you just see two guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam?”

The funky superstitions of the marines run parallel to their own black senses of humor and, because of this, Dispatches is at times spectacularly hilarious. Nothing sums up the book’s comic-terrifying take on the war — Herr at one point calls Vietnam a “dripping, laughing death-face” — better than this story from Ed Fouhy, another reporter, about a helicopter ride he took with a torpid, weary young soldier. Fouhy, trying to make conversation, asked the kid how long he’d been in-country.
The kid half lifted his head; that question could not be serious. The weight was really on him, and the words came slowly.

“All fuckin’ day,” he said.4.If Dispatches is Fear and Loathing in Vietnam, then The Things They Carried is Vietnam as MFA: a meditation on the craft of writing as well as a semi-autobiographical account of the war and the things it did to the author and his friends. “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” for example, is explicitly instructive. A story within a story, it presents a character in the frame-narrative who provides a running critique of the interior tale, arguing (Chekovianly) that each element of a story has to play some role in the central action, and that “clarification or bits of analysis and personal opinion” have no place in the tale: “It just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic.” Now, O’Brien knows this isn’t strictly true — after all, this same character makes his point by interrupting the underlying story O’Brien’s trying to tell. But that’s how people tell stories to each other in real life, and O’Brien is interested, perhaps more than anything else, in just that kind of storytelling — and with good reason. He thinks it’s how you survive a thing like Vietnam.

Take “Speaking of Courage,” for instance, a disturbing account of cowardice and grisly death, and its immediate follow-up, “Notes,” in which the author breaks through to comment on the construction of the previous story: its emotional core (a returning veteran’s simple need to confess about his failure to save a friend’s life), its dramatic frame (the story takes place as the vet drives around and around a lake in his hometown), and the symbolic counterpoint between the lake and the muddy field in Vietnam where the vet lost his friend. The vet’s need to confess is stifled by the warm, protective, polite cocoon of peacetime society, in which it’s not seemly to talk about the realities of war. Without an outlet, though, the poor man suffers, and ultimately takes his own life. In “Notes,” O’Brien tells us about the man’s suicide, but he also tells us that the prior story — at least, the part about the man’s failure to save his friend — was entirely made up. To get at the hard truth — that these guys needed to talk about what had happened to them — O’Brien had to tell a pretty big lie. That’s how you raise the stakes, he says. That’s how you make the drama that makes the people pay attention so you can show them what you know. That’s writing.

A final note: the direct incorporation of these technical aspects of fiction into the final product is something we might today categorize as “meta.” But there’s something natural, even inevitable, in their use in stories about Vietnam. They suggest a gruntlike impatience with the sleek packaging of professional fiction. In that way, they have an almost jury-rigged quality, as though they were thrown together under fire, and with all the guts still in full view.

5.Matterhorn (which I’ve described to friends as The Wire in Vietnam) follows a young Marine lieutenant named Waino Mellas as he survives his first three months in the bush. Waino is a Princeton graduate who abandoned a life of certain professional success to serve as a combat marine, a decision he hopes will come in handy later on (Mellas wants a political career). Although at first the other grunts are suspicious of him, Mellas quickly settles into life at firebase Matterhorn, a hill on the western side of Vietnam, close to the DMZ. Matterhorn is home to Bravo Company, a group of about 200 marines, and they have one big problem. The Company’s commander, Lt. Fitch, has gotten on the wrong side of his immediate superior, Lt. Colonel Simpson, a drunk who doesn’t like that a handsome young marine like Fitch has received praise and commendation from the higher-ups without having the good sense to share his glory with Simpson (who doesn’t actually deserve any, but still).

Partly out of spite, partly out of simple dereliction, Simpson orders Bravo Company to abandon Matterhorn and march for eight days without food or rest in order to build another firebase on a cliff further to the south. This is part of a larger project — driven by political motivations coming all the way down from the Oval Office — that will involve the marines in a useless joint operation with the South Vietnamese army. The North Vietnamese easily exploit this retreat, capturing Matterhorn while the marines are busy elsewhere. Simpson then commands Bravo Company to retake the hill — not because it serves any useful strategic purpose (Simpson orders the company to abandon Matterhorn almost as soon as it’s recaptured), but because “the kill-ratios” are all off. And if killing more Vietnamese means that more Americans will have to die, they’ll just reclassify the whole thing as a battalion action, rather than a company action, and the numbers will even out.

In spite of such mindlessness, the manly human spirit of Bravo Company endures, even finding a way to turn such evils into acts of spiritual rejuvenation. In the novel’s closing pages, a group of marines sit around a fire and sing a rondo about death: “If it’s good enough for Parker, then it’s good enough for me. If it’s good enough for Parker, then it’s good enough for me.” As they sing, they replace the name of each dead man with the name of another dead man, until they’ve sung out all the number of their fallen friends. The interchangeability of one grunt with another is a belief that damns the souls of men like Simpson; but in the hands of men like the marines of Bravo Company, that same belief becomes a bond, a testament. A pledge of relentless true faith.

6.
In each of these books and in all the several stories they tell, one thing keeps popping back up.

“There it is.”

“There it is” was a common catchphrase among the guys in Vietnam, a sort of verbal asterisk that put the whole affair in proper light. Radios down just when the shit’s getting heavy? “There it is.” Colonel breathing down your neck about making checkpoints? “There it is.”

All the many little ironies of bad luck, incompetent commanders, and pass-the-buck-to-the-bush politicians are summed up in those three little words. Like Vonnegut’s “So it goes,” there’s not much more to the phrase than a simple expression of futility, a throwing up of hands in the air, a sigh at the deadly indifference of the universe. But there’s power in these words, and it’s the same with these stories: They are each a human reaction to the inhumanities of massive, nonsensical death. Whether it’s the cluttered, dreamy information of Dispatches, the transparencies of Tim O’Brien, or Matterhorn’s tale of redemption in friendship, the Vietnam War is transformed through each of these books into something we can understand, distilled into something edifying, and saved from the overpowering magnitudes of death. These books close the gap between the untellable story of the dead in Vietnam, and the rest of us, the ones who want to know what happened over there. In this way, they are a powerful act of generosity, both to we, as readers, and to the men who died on the hills and in the jungle, the ones who didn’t make it out.

1.I’ll do you the favor of summarizing all the major plot points of the second volume of The Dream of the Red Chamber. Jia Bao-yu, the eccentric adolescent heir of the phenomenally wealthy Jia family, has a crush on his cousin, Lin Dai-yu, and she has a crush on him. He unintentionally slights her, and they have a fight, which is quickly resolved. Bao-yu’s flirtation with a maid inadvertently leads to her suicide; as the result of the maid’s suicide and his friendship with an escaped slave of the Imperial household, his father beats Bao-yu brutally, leaving him bed-ridden. However, he eventually recovers, and starts a poetry club with his sisters and cousins. They have a poetry contest. At the matriarch’s insistence, the family throws an extravagant birthday party for her granddaughter-in-law, Wang Xi-feng. The party ends poorly when Wang Xi-feng catches her husband cheating on her with a maid. More cousins come to visit, and to honor them, Bao-yu’s sister invites them to the poetry club, which holds another meeting. The family celebrates the New Year festival. That’s more or less all that really happens, and that story takes some 560 pages of tiny, dense text to tell. It’s also only the second volume of five, each about the same length.

At the beginning of the summer, I set out to read the entirety of the David Hawkes translation of The Dream of the Red Chamber. Its author, Cao Xueqin, was the scion of one of the wealthiest families of early Qing China. He was also unfortunate enough, as a child, to be a witness to its dramatic downfall–a result of political purges and property confiscations. Cao spent most of his life in dire poverty, writing and re-writing the semi-autobiographical Dream of the Red Chamber continuously until his death in 1764. Dream of the Red Chamber–circulated in coveted hand-copied manuscripts until the first print edition in 1792–was an almost instant success. The novel has had a profound impact on the Chinese literary tradition; scholarly studies of Red Chamber are so numerous that there is a minor field of study dedicated tothe novel – hongxue, literally, “redology.” Red Chamber serves as an invaluable record of the lifestyle of a wealthy Chinese family at the beginning of the eighteenth century, faithfully portraying the Neo-Confucian conservatism of the newly established Qing dynasty and the anxieties that preoccupied its governing scholar bureaucracy. Its doomed lovers, Jia Bao-yu and Lin Dai-yu, are as iconic in China as Romeo and Juliet are in the West. It’s also notable for its staggering length. At about twenty-eight hundred pages, Dream of the Red Chamber is about twice as long as my copy of War and Peace.

What is most striking to me about the experience of reading this book, however, is not the length. It is the vast distance between The Dream of the Red Chamber and the modern sensibility. In the post-Lish verbal economics of the contemporary novel, where every word has to count, the dramatic waste of words in Red Chamber is astoundingly alien. I am aware, of course, that not every novel is plot-driven, but most novels do tend to have some sort of force propelling them forward, some sort of urgency, whether that urgency is derived from the events, the character, or themes alluded to by the work. Dream of the Red Chamber, on the other hand, is unbelievably comfortable with its own languor. It is often content to bring the story to a complete standstill while it explains the minutiae of household management. The novel often seems to proceed only with a great reluctance.

I won’t tell you it isn’t occasionally boring to read this novel. I also won’t tell you that it isn’t maddening. Or that, after reading every excruciating detail of the umpteenth drinking game, I didn’t want to angrily trample it, like an apostate stomping on the cross. But the extravagant waste of the prose is also part of the overall design of the novel. The low signal-to-noise ratio causes the mind to actively search for the tiny anomalies that reveal the profundity behind the endless series of parties. I love this single sentence, for example:

It was customary in the Jia household to treat the older generation of servants – those who had served the parents of the present masters – with even greater respect than the younger generation of masters, so that in this instance it was not thought at all surprising that You-shi, Xi-feng and Li Wan should remain standing while old Mrs. Lai and three or four other old nannies (though not without first apologizing for the liberty) seated themselves on the stools.

I cannot remember where I last saw the relationships between servants and their masters so concisely described. This sentence (particularly the parenthetical) perfectly captures the way a master’s gesture of apparent humility and gratitude can end up as nothing more than the ultimate expression of power.

The novel is filled with these diamonds in the rough. In fact, the overall technique of the novel is that of an elaborate shell game, as if the narrator were attempting to hide something behind every description of a meal. Surrounded by reams and reams of meaningless detail, the sudden dismissal of a maid jars us as an unconscionable cruelty. We come to understand the magnitude of the Jia family matriarch’s vanity and selfishness by carefully reading between the lines. And only by trudging through each and every poetry contest can the reader absorb the tremendous depth of the regret that suffuses the novel; with each innocent poem written about transience, with each second idly wasted, the young residents of the Jia family mansions unknowingly signal their own doom.

2.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the novel is dead. Heck, forget the novel; the short story is dead. It’s all about flash fiction now. Not only is this a foregone conclusion, everyone knows how it happened, too. Television, or video games, or the internet, or Twitter destroyed our attention spans. For one thing, nobody reads anymore (a sentiment expressed exclusively, it should be noted, by people who read a great deal). And besides, nobody’s interested in fiction anymore (again, a statement that is only ever written by people who love literary fiction).

Myriad and ever-emerging like cockroaches, those essays that would pronounce a final sentence on the novel rely on a gross misperception of how culture works. The logic behind most of these arguments is that readers are only willing to read works that reflect their direct experience; thus, a faster paced world demands shorter stories, or an image-obsessed world eschews text altogether. “Death of the novel” essayists would condemn the art form to the dustbin of history like the telegraph, the typewriter or some other piece of outdated machinery. Theirs is a brutally determinist view of the world; they seem to believe that culture can only reflect–and never influence–the societies and people that produce it.

However, that’s never been my experience. I have continually been shaped by books. To Kill A Mockingbird taught me what courage is. Beowulf taught me about death. Swann’s Waytaught me how to let go of love. And I hope that Dream of the Red Chamber will teach me to pay attention. For as much as life is made out of Joycean epiphanies, it seems that a great deal more of it is composed of lunches and dinners, awful parties, boring family get-togethers, and countless, idly-watched episodes of Law and Order. There seems to be a great deal of value in learning how to find the beauty that lies in this “wasted” time. Not to say that we can’t also have quick beach reads. But we don’t only read to consume; we also read in order to learn and maybe even in order to change and to grow.

Since the beginning of time, there have been long novels and there have been flash fiction–though, back then, flash fiction pieces were called epigrams. I’d argue that the first post-modern novel was Don Quixote. I’d argue that the first anti-novel was Tristam Shandy. The same modes of expression have always been around, albeit with different names and different styles. Their use has only been limited by the mind, which has generally proved flexible enough to find new meaning in the old forms and come up with new forms to talk about those same old universal human experiences.

Through books–both sweepingly long ones and dramatic short ones–we’ve come to terms with the staggering impact of science, the economic traumas of capitalism, the dislocations of globalization, and the unique nightmare of modern war. I think we’ll figure out a way to deal with Twitter, too.

Reacting to the opening ceremony, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a fearless and outspoken critic of his own government’s totalitarian ways, put his finger on the zeitgeist when he said that only a free country could have pulled off this kind of an idiosyncratic entertainment that reflected the character of a free people rather than the marketing vision of a police state.